Arbeit macht frei...

Attending Oktoberfest in the morning and then visiting a concentration camp in the afternoon is not the best of ideas. And I realise it at the Dachau concentration camp which is around ten miles north-west of Munich. We ( S and I, the rest are in no state to travel), take a train and reach there around 4.30 in the evening. The wind is cold and there is something eerie about the place that you can sense even before you enter. We walk through the grilled gates that proclaim 'Work sets you free' to enter a ground with rows of rooms on either side. We decide to first check out the interrogation rooms to our right. The door creeks as we enter and there is semi-darkness. There are rooms on both sides, each of them small and very dimly lit. They have been preserved as they were which basically means we can still see blood stains on the walls! There are quotes of people who lived in those rooms and charts describing their lives before terror caught them. Some stories are really sad and the description of terror tactics blood curdling. What startles you is the realisation that all this happened just around 50 years back. There are inspirational stories as well, people who saved others at considerable risk to their own lives, men who communicated with each other through knocks on the walls for the few weeks that they were there, a few guards who didn't torture...but there is overwhelming grief and sadness within those walls. Everytime the door creaks, I get scared and turn behind. After what seems like an eternity, we walk away from that place to the museum where the Dachau history is detailed. Seems this was a model camp and the Nazis went about replicating the Dachau model everywhere. Nearly 200,000 people were imprisoned behind these walls and around 25,000 died here. Political prisoners, Jews, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, women...no one was spared the torture. The barracks adjoining only barely communicate the inhuman conditions which must have existed in those times. One of the charts has prisoners describing how they spent hours keeping their spartan barracks clean and arranging their beds over and over again lest they invite the wrath of the guards. And I am amazed how even innocent good things like cleanliness became a tool in the hands of the Nazis to break the will of the rest. The open grounds where the barbarian roll calls used to happen is all cold and chilly by evening. The compound walls have barbed wires and the boundary line marked out which if crossed by anyone meant death by shooting. And yet a lot of people willingly crossed those lines for death seemed better to them that the life they lived there. There is also a path with tall trees on both sides which came to symbolise the 'spirit of the Poplar', the bonding which existed among the inhabitants of those camps as they marched to work everyday. There is also a memorial sculpture, a church of reconciliation and 'NEVER AGAIN' written in various languages. At times, you really do hope that history doesn't repeat itself. And if it is any solace, the trials of the Nazi sympathisers and commanders did happen in this very place and came to be called the Dachau trials.